The Felix Chronicles: Freshmen (24 page)

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She nodded twice, stiffly.

“Are you hurt?” He took another step. He was close enough to smell her perfume if she was wearing any—she wasn’t. Another step. If he reached out he could touch her.

She shook her head. Her shimmering hair—it was dark, but not quite black—swayed elegantly over her shoulders and across her back. His eyes followed the contours of her slender arms down to her fingers, long and delicate, ending in fingernails that were flawless, and somewhat pointy. Her fingers were white. Too white. Bone white.
Vampire!
he thought suddenly, his heart lurching to his throat. An icy fear swept over him as he looked up, expecting to see the face of a monster.

But the person in front of him didn’t have fangs. And she wasn’t a monster. Far from it. The beautiful woman before him was staring at him, the traces of an inscrutable smile hovering at the edges of her red lips. Her green eyes blazed like smoldering emeralds, roaming over his face, measuring him. She looked older than the girls on campus, but not that much older, and it was hard for Felix to gauge her exact age because his brain had shifted into panic mode like the time he went camping in the fourth grade and discovered he was sharing his sleeping bag with a garter snake.

And then—without warning—she turned and ran.

Felix felt his feet lift off the ground and take flight after her.

He had no idea why he was running after her. He just was. A voice in his head was telling him that running was the right thing to do, but that he should be running in exactly the opposite direction—
back to the dorm
. Ignoring the voice, he ran ahead. The woman’s dark hair trailed out behind her as she darted between two of the Star Trees and headed west, already distancing herself from him. He was going faster now, sprinting full bore, passing under hugely thick branches, but still not gaining any ground. It wasn’t in Felix’s nature to be confident about anything, but he was pretty certain he was the fastest kid on campus. And now a woman dressed like she’d been at the prom was outpacing him, and she was doing it in the strangest way. Her arms weren’t even moving; they remained by her sides—and perfectly still—as she ran.

You’re chasing after a ghost, you idiot
, he told himself as she flew past a stone building with large stained glass windows and an old weathered cross above the entrance. She abruptly changed direction, turning north, and then she disappeared. Felix raced past a noticeboard on the other side of a low wrought iron railing that said ST. ROSE CHAPEL and some other things he couldn’t read because the letters were small and his head was bobbing wildly up and down.

He turned the corner and saw a flash of blue vanishing into the ground. At the end of a long bed of withering flowers that bordered the church, he came upon stairs leading down to a heavy oak and iron door. It stood slightly ajar. Left open for him. He didn’t hesitate. He scampered down the concrete steps and sprinted through a narrow corridor, searching for the lady in blue. Inside, it was cool, dark and earthy. The ceiling was low, the walls rough stone. Every so often, a bare ceiling bulb provided a pocket of struggling light. His feet slapped against the smooth stone tiles, the only sound he could hear. But where did she go? He slowed down, thinking she must have lost him.

A wisp of blue fabric shot down a hallway to his left. He wasn’t sure where she’d come from but now he was closing the gap on her. He turned down the same corridor to find that she was twenty yards ahead, and moving fast—she’d doubled the distance between them in the time it took Felix to mistakenly conclude that he was gaining on her. This corridor was longer—much longer—than the first. It was also angled downward, making him feel like he was going a hundred miles an hour. He was running fast and out of control, almost missing a pair of stairs, just barely avoiding a major wipeout. He kept his feet, using the walls for balance, and barreled ahead.

When the next set of stairs appeared, he was better prepared, and hurdled them without breaking stride. The little voice in his head was back, reminding him that the woman was leading him deep below the ground. Chasing a
vampire
to the center of the earth—to her
lair
—probably wasn’t very smart.
But,
the little voice added,
vampires can’t tolerate holy ground, right?
So she couldn’t be a vampire. So maybe she really was a ghost.
What’s the difference, you idiot? You shouldn’t be chasing after ghosts either.

The corridor ended abruptly and the woman blurred away to her right, her dress whipping around the corner. Seconds later, Felix arrived at the wall. Hallways ran in both directions. She was nowhere in sight. He stopped to listen, breathing hard, sweat streaming down his face.

He heard a faint noise coming from the corridor to his left. He took off in that direction, but his wet sneakers lost their grip on the smooth stone floor and he slipped and slammed into a wall, grunting as the ensuing pain from body-checking solid stone shot up his shoulder. He ran on. The noise was getting louder. It sounded like a child banging on a pot with a wooden spoon. The noise was
too
loud, too glaringly obvious in the silence. Was she trying to draw him in? Was this a trap? What the hell was he doing?

He plunged through a doorway, stuttering to a stop before colliding into a long table stacked atop another long table. The woman appeared at the far side of a room filled with chairs and more tables and an assortment of bric a brac. She was moving incredibly fast, a blue streak against the pale walls. And just before she disappeared through another doorway, she glanced over her shoulder. Their eyes met—and then she was gone.

Felix chased after her—even though he had the chills so badly every electrified hair on his body was threatening to ignite—and emerged into a room full of moving boxes and tall metal storage racks packed with candles, dishes, goblets and other small items. He crossed the room, passing through yet another doorway. The voice in his head was screaming at him:
Where the hell are you going?

The woman breezed through a doorway to his right, her blue dress billowing out behind her. He followed her into a small dark room that smelled of rain and dirt. He skidded to a halting stop and quickly scanned the room, his eyes on high alert for a shock of blue. His breaths were coming fast. There was a noise off to his right. He bolted around a chest-high stack of boxes and came to a wall. And set within the wall… was a door. It was open a crack.

Hand shaking, he reached out for the doorknob before realizing it didn’t have one. He paused, confused, then curled his fingers around the edge of the door, feeling the biting coldness of steel. He took a deep breath, and in one motion, flung it open and jumped back.

He was greeted by a blast of cool damp air and a sight he never imagined he would see in a million years. Too stunned to move, he stared straight ahead, standing at the entrance of a tunnel that seemed to go on forever. It wasn’t for lack of light that he couldn’t see where it ended. Encased in antique-looking metal cages, powerful bulbs (LEDs, or something else like it), brightly illuminated the tunnel.

Not sure why he was doing this—
curiosity? madness?—
he drifted inside. It was wide, twice the width of the corridors to his back, the ceiling high and vaulted. He knew this had to be one of the tunnels Lucas and Allison had been talking about at the Caffeine Hut. He took a few steps, then thought better of it and ran back to the door, checking to make sure it wasn’t going to close shut and lock him in. There was no doorknob on this side either, just another keyhole. He closed it and opened it and closed it and opened it. Then he did it all over again for good measure. It seemed safe enough. It couldn’t be locked without a key. So as long as no one ventured down here and locked him in he figured he’d be okay to go exploring for a minute.

The air was still, heavy with moisture, and yet there was no sign of water. The floor was hard, dry and flat. The walls were concrete. So were the floors and ceiling. Miles of cold monotonous gray encased everything. Industrial cables, pipes and plastic tubes crisscrossed along the ceiling like veins and arteries. The lights buzzed in the funereal stillness. About twenty feet in, he spotted a glint of something—a reflection?—on the wall up ahead and to his right. It soon became apparent that the ceiling lights were skating across lots of shiny things on the wall, and those shiny things were reflecting back at him. He went over to have a closer look. The
shiny things
turned out to be plaques. Every four or five feet, squarish, postcard-sized plaques were imbedded in the concrete. Most were a bronze color—copper?—and tarnished at the edges.

He examined the closest one, the one at eye level. There was something on it. Some kind of writing? An inscription? He breathed hot air on it and buffed it with his shirtsleeve. Letters began to emerge. R. R-O.
Robert?
It was a name… and dates. It said:

Robert Filton, Jr.

1734-1792

Felix gasped and stumbled back.
This was no ordinary wall.
Below each plaque there was a rectangular impression etched into the concrete like a pencil mark on a piece of paper. He knew what this was. These were storage lockers. Storage lockers for bodies. He was looking at coffins. They were crammed into the wall from top to bottom, and their reach appeared to extend as far as the tunnel itself. An old sepia-toned picture from his Western Civ textbook of the Catacombs in Rome flashed through his mind.

There was a cemetery below campus. And Felix was standing in it.

His skin crawled as a frosty chill slithered into the pit of his stomach, freezing his insides. He backpedaled until he’d pressed himself up against the opposite wall, staring open-mouthed at the bank of coffins. There had to be hundreds of them, maybe even thousands.
Thousands
of dead people down here with him. Nobody knew he was here. Suddenly, he no longer had any interest in finding the woman in the blue dress. He turned and started running flat out toward the door.

It slammed shut.

And then the lights went out.

He froze for a moment as a tingling shiver flashed down his spine. The darkness was complete. Light simply couldn’t exist in this subterranean world. Then he reached out until his fingers made contact with the nearest wall. His heart racing, he took a few steps toward the door, skimming his fingers along the wall to keep his feet going in the right direction, feeling its coarse, sandpaper-like surface and the tiny ridges left by trowel blades.

“We’ve been waiting for you, Felix.”

The voice—a woman’s voice—was simultaneously coming from nowhere and everywhere.

Felix went cold with fear. He yanked his head around, trying to pinpoint the woman’s—
the ghost’s
—voice.

“We’ve been waiting for so many years,” she said.

With one hand on the wall and the other out in front of his body, he lurched forward, stumbling toward the door, anticipating at any moment to feel cold dead ghost hands wrapping around him, pulling him down.

His outstretched fingers stubbed painfully into something with a smooth cold surface—
the door
. Frantically, he ran his hands all over it, searching for the doorknob. Then he remembered it didn’t have one. He pounded on it, yelling for help.

“Felix.”

The voice was right behind him. He felt like she was whispering in his ear, like her lips were brushing against his skin.

He spun around, awaiting the caresses of the ghost’s icy fingers on his face. “What do you want?” he shouted, his voice high and wild. He banged on the door with his elbow. Each thump was met by an echo.

“I want you to find your truth,” she answered.

“What?”

“The choice is yours.”

“What choice?” he asked unsteadily, only vaguely aware that he was having a conversation with a ghost.

“The only choice that matters. Welcome, Felix.”

Then the lights came back on.

Certain that he was going to be face-to-face with the ghost, he threw up his arms to protect himself.

An interminable moment passed.

He held his breath, and risked a peek between his forearms. He was all alone. It was just him. There was no woman in blue in the tunnel.

With a rush of adrenaline, he turned back to the door and tried to pry it open, but it was flush with the inner wall and his fingers couldn’t gain any leverage. He pounded on it. He kicked at it. But the door barely even rattled. When the echoes finally faded and died back to nothing and the silence returned, he attempted something else: He stuck his pinkie in the keyhole and wriggled it around. When all that was left was trying to use his finger as a key, he saw the writing on the wall and gave up. He would have to find another way out.

His legs were jittery and his heart was slamming hard and fast against his sternum as he headed down the tunnel. The ghost’s voice—he’d reached a definitive conclusion that she was a ghost—was still ringing in his head:
I want you to find your truth. The choice is yours.
He tried to avoid looking at the wall of coffins to his right. As irrational as it might seem in the safe light of day, at any moment, he half-expected an army of rotting corpses to come crawling out of their caskets. But it was like trying not to rubberneck on the highway at the scene of a twenty-car pile-up—his eyes were just drawn to the plaques. He read some of the names as he moved steadily through the corridor: Louis Multo 1763-1824. Sarah O’Reilly 1754-1813.
Damn
, he thought, awed.
These people have been dead a long time.

He walked faster, his sneakers scuffling and squishing along on the concrete floor, wishing he hadn’t left his cell phone on his desk. When he arrived at another corridor that intersected with the one he was on he felt the tiniest bit of hope, and broke into a jog. The lights started to flicker. He stopped, waiting for the darkness—and the ghost in the blue dress—to return. Then all the lights lit up even brighter than before—
all the lights but one
. On the wall where the two tunnels converged a single bulb continued to flicker. He padded over to it, cautiously, hoping the ghost was trying to show him the way out.